Welcome to the Middle East Channel Editors Vlog, or possibly MECTV, or the MEC-VLOG or -- if I get my way -- Aardvark TV! We're working on it. Whatever the name, I'm thrilled to announce the pilot episode of what we hope will be a weekly video blog hosted by me on the Middle East Channel. Hey, it worked for Justin Bieber, right?  

We recorded the pilot episode this week. It touches on Syria (jump to 1:01), Yemen (4:15), and the war debate (7:08); talks about some of my favorite articles on the Channel last week (9:45), including Aili Tripp's overview of the debate on electoral quotas for women and Michael Hanna's fascinating counterfactual on whether the Arab spring would have toppled Saddam; and profiles my book of the week (10:40). As we sort out the tech issues, we'll insert chapter breaks so you can link directly to segments.  We had some fun with this one, and I hope you all do too!

Not all the episodes are going to be quite so, um....well you can provide your own descriptor once you've watched it. Each episode will be different, and most will bring in guests to join the conversation.  Most weeks I plan to respond to selected questions which readers pose on Twitter, in the comment section, or over email. I'll talk about MEC articles, and when possible get the authors on camera -- or at least on Skype -- to answer questions about them. We'll feature conversations with scholars, authors, policy makers, and folks from the Middle East who come through Washington. We'll feature a book every week, some to recommend and others not so much. We'll have fun.

A big part of the reason for doing this is the opportunity to interact with readers, so do tweet questions or suggestions for the show at me (@abuaardvark) or drop me a line. We're hoping that this will be fun as well as informative. Thanks for watching, and be kind as we work out the bugs!

The last American troops officially left Iraq before Christmas, mostly completing an American withdrawal by the end of 2011 which few thought possible when then-candidate Barack Obama promised it or even when then-President George Bush formally committed to it. Critics of the withdrawal have blasted Obama for putting politics over policy, risking the alleged gains of the "surge" in order to meet a campaign promise. Many of those who played a role in the desperate attempt to reverse Iraq's 2006 descent into civil war have entirely legitimate and justifiable fears for Iraq's future. But in fact, Obama's decision to complete the withdrawal from Iraq was probably better policy than it was politics -- and it was the right call both for America and for Iraq.

In many ways, it would have been safer politically for Obama to keep the residual force in Iraq which hawks demanded to insulate himself against charges of having "lost Iraq". But it would have been wrong on policy. It's not just that the U.S. was obligated by the SOFA to withdraw its forces, once it proved unable to negotiate the terms of an extended troop presence with the immunity provisions which the Pentagon demanded. It's that the remaining U.S. troops could do little for Iraqi security, had little positive effect on Iraqi politics, and would have soon become an active liability. This is the lesson of the last two years, when U.S. troops were reduced in number and largely withdrew to the bases under the terms of the SOFA. The American troop presence didn't prevent bombings and murders, didn't force political reconciliation, didn't usher in real democracy, and didn't significantly increase American diplomatic influence in the region. But nor did Iraq fall apart. Obama's gamble is that the same sequence will play out in 2012 and that he will have successfully left behind an Iraq which isn't perfect but which has avoided yet another catastrophe.

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In the midst of all the changes the Arab Spring has brought in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, among others, the intelligent lay, media, and policy worlds have remained largely deaf to the Kurdish question. This is an unfortunate situation because much has occurred concerning Kurdish nationalism, particularly in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. However, the Kurdish version of the Arab Spring did not just begin in 2011, but has been going on for decades: In Turkey (at least since the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) formally began its insurgency in August 1984), as well as in Iraq since the days of Mulla Mustafa Barzani beginning in the early 1960s, but especially since the end of the two U.S. wars against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and even more in 2003. These two wars led to the creation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, the most successful attempt at Kurdish statehood in modern times.

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With the deadline for the withdrawal all U.S. troops from Iraq less than 100 days away, nobody seems to know whether troops will be allowed to stay, how many, and under what conditions. Even the basic parameters of a possible Iraqi request for a follow-on U.S. military training presence remain largely unknown and caught in the labyrinth of local politics. This uncertainty is snarling planning efforts and has certainly irked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who famously exhorted Iraq's political leaders to "dammit, make a decision" during his first trip to Baghdad this summer.

Why exactly is a troop decision taking so long? It is certainly a highly sensitive matter, but the deadline was set in 2008 and has hardly sneaked up on anyone. The answer relates to the incredibly complex nature of the trade-offs involved. Iraqis must weigh their known security vulnerabilities against the deep unpopularity of a continued foreign troop presence in their country. At the same time, and through the same decision, they are effectively calibrating the balance of their relationship between the United States and Iran. Overlaid on this is the funhouse mirror of Iraqi domestic politics, where in some circumstances a lose-lose is preferred to a win-win.

United States and Iraqi officials have yet to yet to set out a compelling and shared vision for a post-2011 mission for U.S. troops that responds to these trade-offs (as opposed to weighing the raw number of troops likely to be politically palatable in both countries). Now the clock is ticking, and little time remains to help the Iraqis undertake a genuine examination of the pros and cons of various options on this highly consequential decision for their country.

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The United States' military participation in the 22 combined checkpoints across the disputed territories in northern Iraq formally ended on August 1. This was an important event because peacekeeping and conflict prevention in Kirkuk and other territories disputed between Baghdad and Erbil have frequently been cited as among the key stabilizing roles that the U.S. military plays in Iraq. And the tripartite Combined Security Mechanism (CSM) of the U.S. military, Iraqi Army, and Kurdish peshmerga did increase coordination between Iraqi government and Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) security forces while serving as a credible crisis management mechanism. It now faces a leap into the unknown without the U.S. glue that has held it together so far.

Will the phasing out of the U.S. role mean, as one leaked U.S. intelligence report suggested, that without strong and fair third party influence tensions along the Arab-Kurdish line may quickly turn to violence? Or is too much being made of the transition in what was always intended to be a temporary mechanism? 

The answer is a little bit of both. It is unlikely that the U.S. troop withdrawal will lead directly to a conventional military blowout between the Iraqi Army and peshmerga. In all probability, conditions in most disputed areas will be steady on a day-to-day basis.  But its withdrawal will make the situation less stable. The CSM has been a failsafe to prevent episodic crises in individual hotspots from spiraling out of control. Its removal makes the next miscalculation or local standoff more difficult to defuse and potentially graver in its consequences. There almost certainly will be such testing events as the parties jockey to create facts on the ground.

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Last Tuesday, two Katusha rockets directly struck the Kuwaiti Embassy in Iraq, while another hit a nearby building. No one was hurt and all Kuwaiti employees left Iraq and returned to Kuwait for Ramadan. A Kuwait parliamentarian angrily called for the expulsion of the Iraqi ambassador from Kuwait. Even in the turbulence of today's Middle East, such an incident raises eyebrows.

The attack and the political furor that followed fit an alarming pattern of escalating Iraqi-Kuwaiti tensions. In April 2010, as a part of a $1.2 billion demand for reparations, lawyers acting on behalf of Kuwait Airways sought the impounding of an Iraqi Airways plane as it landed in London for the first time in two decades -- a moment of considerable national pride. In January, a Kuwaiti Coast Guard officer was killed in an altercation with an Iraqi fishing boat, which was sunk during the incident. And late last year Qais Al-Azzawi, the Iraqi ambassador to the Arab League, suggested that Iraq did not accept the U.N. demarcated border -- a comment that sounded eerily similar to one of Saddam Hussein's flimsy pretexts for the 1990 invasion.

These tensions have taken a dramatic turn for the worse over Kuwaiti plans to build a new port on a sensitive location at the mouth of the long-contested Shaat Al-Arab. The uproar has been exacerbated by democratic politics in Iraq and Kuwait, as issues of national pride and historical memory have proven irresistible to ambitious politicians. Yet these parliamentarians are putting at risk striking new opportunities for cooperation between the former antagonists, which could lead to conflict that nobody really wants.

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As the deadline for the U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq draws nearer, concerns about conflict along the trigger line in the oil-rich, ethnically-mixed province of Kirkuk have increased. Many worry that the absence of American-led joint patrols will create a security vacuum that encourages communal violence and terrorism. Others link the withdrawal to what they call ‘democratic negligence,' arguing for greater international efforts to resolve ethnic tensions in Kirkuk before the drawdown. These concerns are not unfounded; however, aside from a limited, Baghdad-approved U.S. military presence, the Kirkuk issue should be left for Iraqis to resolve. New realities in post-Saddam Iraq have increased the costs for everyone of a protracted Kirkuk conflict while creating opportunities for deal-making between Baghdad and Arbil. 

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The no-fly zone in Libya began with an urgent need to protect civilians, but in common with many past international humanitarian interventions, is inevitably expanding to clear space for a new political order. Barack Obama, Nikolas Sarkozy and David Cameron have now made the case in "Libya's Pathway to Peace" that "it is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Qaddafi in power." So far though, the U.S. and its allies seem less prepared for the political, social and economic reconstruction dynamics likely to be unleashed by the eventual ouster of Qaddafi than they were for the military mechanics of establishing a no-fly zone. The Libya intervention has little in common with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, despite the oft-heard criticisms. But there are some generic lessons on post-authoritarian transitions in conflict devastated societies that were acquired at great cost in Iraq. These should now be heeded if the administration and its international partners' initial humanitarian impulse is to translate into a lasting contribution to Libya's stability. 

President Obama is correct that the difficulties of intervening militarily everywhere do not mean that we should not intervene anywhere. But past experience should be a bright, blinking reminder that military interventions to avert immediate humanitarian crises are not one-off, pinprick operations. In Libya, a possible humanitarian disaster in Benghazi was averted through the international intervention last month, but only weeks later Misurata faces an equally grave moment of reckoning. This underscores the reality that the immediate threats to the civilian population in rebel-held cities are only symptoms of deeper underlying political failings, which a no-fly zone is unable to address by itself. 

Iraq is the touchstone for failing to think about the day after military operations. However one may feel about the decision to invade, it was not preordained that the post-war period had to be as bloody and chaotic as it was, nor the consequences for regional stability as severe. Despite the incredible daily press of current events in the Middle East, it would be tragic to repeat this history in Libya. We and the Iraqis have painful experience with the path dependency that can result from initial mistakes. In Libya, this argues for giving ourselves the space to understand the local context better before making future reconstruction allocation decisions, prioritizing the development of incipient governing and civil capacity, and understanding that rushed transition benchmarks are unlikely to be inclusive and can do more harm than good.   

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As the United States and its European allies launch attacks against the regime of Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddhafi, it seems almost poignant that this third military intervention in a Muslim country in the last decade began nearly eight years to the day that the United States invaded Iraq. It is a fitting reminder that even as 50,000 soldiers remain in Iraq, and American soldiers continue to be killed and maimed there, the lessons of that disastrous decision to go to war remain largely unlearned by many in the foreign policy community.

At the outset it's important to acknowledge the key differences in the manner in which these interventions have been undertaken and the differing levels of international and regional legitimacy that they possess. But it is the similarities that are more disquieting. The U.S. has yet again become involved in a military effort of indeterminate length, justified through a questionable definition of national interest and with little forethought to the long-term consequences of utilizing military force. It seems the costs and consequences of Iraq have simply not been fully appreciated by policymakers and pundits. A full accounting is therefore in order.

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Somewhat lost in the wave of protests sweeping through the Middle East, which are now washing up on Iraq's shores, has been the recent deployment of two brigades of Kurdish peshmerga troops in the disputed province of Kirkuk in northern Iraq. There has been a peshmerga presence in Kirkuk since 2003, but stationed north of the provincial capital of Kirkuk city. However, following Iraq's own "Day of Rage" on Feb. 25, peshmerga forces moved to take up positions along a line south of the city. Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) officials have stated that the deployment is needed to protect Kurdish populations in the disputed areas from the threat posed by what they claim are terrorist-infiltrated demonstrations. The Iraqi government's response to the move has so far been muted, but local Arab leaders in Kirkuk and some of their Turkoman counterparts are expressing alarm that the move will fuel intercommunal tension and requesting intervention by the national government. Underscoring the potential seriousness of the situation, on Sunday, U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey and U.S. Forces Commanding General Lloyd Austin met with KRG President Massoud Barzani to discuss security arrangements in Kirkuk.

The status of Kirkuk and other disputed territories in northern Iraq is perhaps the major unresolved potential political driver of conflict in Iraq as American troops prepare to withdraw later this year, and at various points since 2008 the Iraqi Army and the Kurdish peshmerga have come close to an armed confrontation. The current situation in Kirkuk is likely to be defused without further escalation, but it raises important questions about the consolidation of U.S.-backed conflict-prevention mechanisms aimed at forestalling the use of military units to resolve territorial disputes as well as the lack of a viable Iraqi political process to begin to resolve the core elements underlying the territorial conflict. Without any political road map or vision existing for addressing the fate of the disputed territories, there is the risk that parties are tempted to take matters into their own hands and that moments of social unrest, such as the current demonstrations around poor services and unemployment, quickly degenerate into ethnic tension.

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BAGHDAD — The only way to get to Baghdad's Tahrir Square -- yes, it has one too -- on Feb. 25 was to walk. It was a treat to stride down roads usually solid with traffic, but the silent city also felt ominous. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had warned that the long-planned "Day of Rage" protests would be infiltrated by al Qaeda and remnants of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime, and imposed a ban on all vehicles within city limits to reduce the risk of car bombs. Religious leaders warned people to stay away, while security officials made doom-laden predictions of violence. Most people were too scared to venture outside.

The hush throughout Baghdad made the clamor in Tahrir Square seem all the louder. Thousands of demonstrators had walked for miles to gather there, not even bothering to go to Friday prayers first. They were mostly men -- some university graduates, others day laborers, but all with the same grievances. We have no electricity and no water, scant job opportunities, and our politicians are liars and thieves, they said. They flung themselves against the blast walls blocking the entrance to the Green Zone, a symbol of the distant and unaccountable elite that they were raging against.

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Iraqis who voted decisively for change in the March 2010 election have some reason to be disappointed with the familiar faces dominating the government, which was unveiled yesterday after nine months of negotiations. But there's one institution in the Iraqi political system which will soon take on an unmistakably new look: the Council of Representatives. With some 213 out of 275 members losing their seats in March, Iraq's Parliament now offers the best hope for political change and progress towards the consolidation of Iraq's fledgling democracy. Avoiding the dangers of either state fragmentation or a return to autocracy will require an active parliament which monitors and checks a powerful Prime Minister and gives a political voice to a disappointed Iraqiyya coalition.  

Perhaps the most notable change I noticed while in Baghdad last week, as compared to an earlier visit over the summer, was the tone among the political class. In contrast to the dire warnings of exclusion and the death of Iraq's democracy that were prevalent then, the current mood appears to reflect a desire to move forward with the new government. It may be as simple as mere exhaustion with the drawn out government formation process, but part of this change in tone may also be due to the positive early marks given to the work of the new Parliamentary leadership: Speaker Osama Nujaifi, an Arab nationalist from the former regime's stronghold of Mosul, and his First Deputy Qusayal-Suhail, a leading member of the Sadrist coalition that draws its support from the large, urban Shiite populations in Baghdad and southern Iraq. Iraqiyya's real role could well be found as much in the important Speakership position as in the still-nebulous National Council for Strategic Policies, while the Sadrists will only ultimately transform into a purely political movement if they move in the direction of leadership figures like Qusay al-Suhail. 

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A 'peace process' that, from its inception, took Israel's self-definition of its own security needs as the sole determinate of the walls within which any solution for Palestinians was to be conducted, has reached exhaustion. Based on such a reductive premise, its arrival at this deathly nadir, with no more than a prospect of disjointed alleviated occupation, possessing the most hollow trappings of statehood as its final security-led outcome, should evoke no surprise.

The non-solution to which such a premise would take us would defuse nothing: indeed, it might well prove to be the spark that could exacerbate or explode simmering regional animosities -- even if these animosities were not ostensibly linked directly to the Palestinian issue.   

Any thought that such a hollowed-out solution -- alleviated occupation, posing as statehood -- will defuse anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world is likely to prove to be resoundingly misplaced. On this, the critics from the political Right are correct: a flawed Israeli-Palestinian agreement, per se, will not drain-off anti-western regional sentiment; it will exacerbate it. It will feed it. But the corollary the Right pushes in its place, that defeating Iran somehow precisely is that elusive magic bullet the West so ardently desires (the key to soothing regional tensions and defusing hostility towards the West) represents an even greater pathology and disassociation from reality. It is one that is no less illusory for having the apparent endorsement of America's Arab clients, whose talk is no more than a reflection back into the looking-glass of American diplomacy, as it stares at its own face.

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It is not exactly the best of times for the United States in the Middle East.  The prospects of Palestinian-Israeli peace grow dimmer by the day.  Hamas continues to rule in Gaza.  Hizballah's stock of missiles steadily grows, even as it threatens to upend the tenuous civil peace in Lebanon if any of its members are indicted by the Special International Tribunal investigating the death of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri.  It took Iraq eight grueling months to form a government after U.S.-backed elections, and then only after Muqtada al-Sadr, the fiercest opponent of the American presence in Iraq, played king-maker. Iran might or might not be willing to negotiate with the P5 + 1, but not about its nuclear program, and it continues to act as if it is the rising power in the region. 

Why does the United States have all these problems?  Because of the Iraq War of 2003, which created two important vacuums in regional politics -- one in the region's balance of power and the other inside of Iraq, each with its own negative consequences for American interests. It would be unlikely that any major upheaval in the distribution of power would fail to have long-term effects on politics across the region. That is certainly what the last administration hoped -- that a brilliant victory in Iraq would not only replace Saddam Hussein with a stable, pro-American democratic government, but also lead to pressure on America's regional enemies (Iran and Syria), encourage democratic reform in America's friends (Egypt and Saudi Arabia), spur Arab-Israeli peace and reduce regional terrorism. The neo-cons and Bushies were right that the war would have a substantial regional impact; they were just wrong about its nature and direction.

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